Yesterday I realized how much I have recently been respected and taken into consideration at the Refuge.
I am the owner of the business, the “boss” so to speak, but until a few months ago there was a lot of disorder.
Everyone did a little bit as he believed and I often found myself in trouble for not being able to keep order and get the employees to perform the tasks they needed to keep things going.
I realized that now people let themselves be guided by me, they listen to what I tell them not as if it were an order, but with confidence.
They take my solutions very seriously.
Before, everyone had to have their say, ending up all going in different directions without any practical and useful conclusion.
Now they wait to hear my opinion and take it as a starting point on which to discuss and work on eventually.
What happened?
How to make others trust you
I am no longer afraid!
My self-esteem improved and as a result I became whole and consistent.
Out of fear, long ago, I made absurd turns to get where I wanted, I complicated things a lot by taking them from afar.
Each decision or action required unnecessary time and energy.
I was the boss, but I didn’t want to show myself superior, I was afraid of not being appreciated and of being rejected .
So simply if I needed a helper of mine to do a simple task instead of just asking, I was looking for a way to make him understand.
Maybe I started by making it clear that I had everything to do and creating small feelings of guilt in others with the hope that they would tell me: I’ll help you!
Sometimes they got there and sometimes they didn’t even notice.
And I thought I was worth nothing!
I found myself doing everything by myself, leaving things half done to stay on time and respect needs. I created confusion and misunderstandings and often bad moods and disorder at work arose.
In all of this I accumulated enormous stress .
My fear of not being appreciated led me to feel guilty when patrons asked me for the bill.
They were visibly satisfied with the service they received, but I always feared the bill was inadequate.
Inadequate for what?
Inadequate for me to feel appreciated!
If it had been wrong I could have been misjudged and therefore rejected, so I tried to keep the customer good by lowering the amount by offering this and that.
I was losing more and more credibility and, again, I was building up enormous stress.
But what did I need all of this?
I didn’t trust myself , so I depended tremendously on the judgment of others .
I thought: if others do not accept me and turn away from me how will I manage?
How will I do it alone?
Little by little I grew up and learning to love I began to trust myself and the more I trusted, the more I understood my value, the more I could express it to the world.
I started being consistent .
I no longer had to hide who I was inside and what I had inside began to coincide with what I was outside.
I began to say what I thought, to ask for what I needed, to do what I thought was right.
I started expressing myself!
There were no more strange and incomprehensible turns.
As I was before I was unreliable because there was little clarity and little consistency between one situation and the next. My behavior was often false and therefore not very credible.
It was the result of what I thought would allow me to be appreciated and therefore accepted.
Now that I love I always do what I think is right and what I think is right I express it.
The more I do it, the more confident I feel about myself precisely because I know it’s right.
I act, I show results, I am a guide and a reference and everyone follows me in a virtuous circle that is constantly fed.
If you love and trust yourself, or yourself, you will no longer be afraid of being alone , you will be consistent and others, paradoxically, will trust you, turning you into a real reference.
They know that if you say something it is the “right” one, guided by love and if you say it it is because you believe it and you will do it.
Last night when I got home I went to say hello to my parents.
The other day I wrote to you about how I took on the responsibility of helping my dad make a decision by signing a pact of eternity, love and mutual trust.
If you have missed that newsletter, you can read it on this page ⇒
The decision looked at work outside the home in particular referring to cutting wood.
I took it this way, knowing that I would complete it without half measures.
My dad learned to trust me because I became whole and consistent.
He knows I’ll respect the deal.
So he showed me what I interpreted as the countersigning of the pact itself and the acceptance of my assumption of responsibility: a new chainsaw bought for me on my measure so that he can teach me what I signed for
